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Shrugging, he stretches both strong arms along the back of the booth. He grips the fake leather so tightly with his fingers that the veins in his biceps and forearms pop out even more. “I just held my breath and stopped fighting her, so she thought I was dead.”
“Damn, man,” I mutter, unable to imagine my mom doing something so horrible at such a young age. “What did you do after she tried to kill you?”
“Oh, I went about life like usual. I just kept going to school and shit.” He chuckles and says, “When I walked through the kitchen to grab breakfast that first morning, she screamed and threw the hot frying pan full of eggs at me. The dumb bitch thought I was a damn ghost.”
“She actually believed you had died and come back as a ghost?” I repeat unable to help my smile even if it’s a fucked-up story.
“She thought she had killed me and that I had come back to haunt her since she buried me and everything in a shallow grave in the backyard.
“Jesus! She fuckingburiedyou after drowning you?” I exclaim in disbelief.
“Yeah, but not well, thankfully, or I probably would’ve suffocated before clawing my way out.”
His mother tried to drown him, buried him alive, threw a hot pan at him when he was seven or eight? And all that happened to seven- or eight-year-old Eli in just the span of a day. No wonder he’s so fucked up.
“Every time I walked into a room after that night she would scream,” he goes on to say. “I fucking loved it because it was the sound of me claiming a tiny shred of revenge. She had hit me plenty of times trying to ‘knock the devil out of me.’ Finally, I had figured out a way to hurt her back. After being so weak for so long, I felt…powerful.”
“Your mother seriously thought the devil was in you, when you were just a kid?”
“She didn’t just think it, she was absolutely certain I was possessed or some shit. She would slap the shit out of me or full-on punch me in the face trying to get the evil out of me. The night the drowning happened was right after I decided to hit her ass back for the first time. Hit her so hard I knocked the bitch to the ground.”
“Sounds like she deserved much worse.”
“Oh, she did. Still, she cried and sobbed the entire time she held me under the bath water. I don’t think shewantedto kill me, but she thought she was doing the world a favor, saving it from me. And when she thought I came back to haunt her asa ghost, she felt so damn guilty for my murder that one night I found her just chugging all the pill bottles in the medicine cabinet. I tried to stop her, knocked them away and poured the rest down the toilet while telling her I was still alive, not a goddamn ghost, and that her attempt to kill me obviously failed.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She passed out on the floor crying so I went to bed, figured she would either live until the next morning or wouldn’t; I no longer cared either way.”
He stops telling the story there, but I’m so invested I need to know more. That’s why I can’t help but ask, “Well? Did she live?”
He nods his head and bites down on his bottom lip a moment before reaching a blood-stained fingertip out to trace the lines of my abs closest to him. I gasp at the soft, teasing touch. My mind is headed deep into the gutter when he says, “She lived. I was asleep when she pulled me out of bed by my arm and dragged me all the way outside to the backyard where the sun was just starting to come up. Same yard where she had buried me weeks earlier. She yanked on my shoulder so hard it popped out of socket. I was in agony.” Lower and lower that fingertip of his traces before starting all over again at the top, making it hard to concentrate on his words. But I do, blocking out the happy tingles, since this is important. I don’t know why it’s important to me if I’ll be dead in a few hours or days, but I listen to him and warn my dick to shut up. “I didn’t even know what the crazy bitch was doing until she had padlocked a dog collar around my neck and chained me to the fence with another padlock. Then she just…left, went back inside the house with a big sigh of relief and a smile on her face like she was proud of herself.”
“She left you chained up outside like an abused dog? For how long?”
“A little over twenty-four hours,” he says.
“Wow. She kept you out there a whole day and night?”
“I tried a million different combinations on both locks. There was no food, no water other than what little rain had collected in an old dirty dog bowl out there. I had a big, noisy mutt that died from heat or something right out there on that chain months before,” he says. “Anyway, the next morning was a Monday, a school day. A kid in the neighborhood heard me swearing in frustration at the damn locks from the corner school bus stop. He came around the house and found me. I asked him to go get me some bolt cutters to snap the locks. Instead, the police and social services showed up.”
“They arrested her?”
“They arrested her and asked me if she had hurt me before. I told them everything, about her trying to knock the devil out of me with her fists and thinking she had drowned me then buried me.”
“Did you have any relatives to take you in?”
“God, no. Not that I would’ve wanted to live with any ofherrelatives.” He reaches across my body to the other side of my abs, his arm resting heavily but not uncomfortable on my stomach as he watches his fingertip slowly trace each line of those muscles. “I didn’t know who my father was, so I ended up in foster care. A big house with three other boys and a girl. I was fucking starving too, so when I finally, after days, had a slice of meatloaf in front of me next to a pile of potatoes, it felt like I had died and gone to heaven.” Shaking his head, he smiles and says, “The first bite was the best damn thing I hadevertasted. I went to stab my fork in the loaf for another bite and the oldest kid, fourteen or fifteen to my seven or eight, reached over and snatched it right off my plate with his dirty ass hands.”
“No fucking way,” I say, unable to imagine someone else being a dick to the poor little boy who had already suffered enough.
“Oh, yeah. He shoved my meatloaf right into his fat mouth while the foster mom had her back turned washing dishes. So, I aimed my fork for his loaf still untouched on his plate. He tried to cover it with his hand.” Eli chuckles at the memory. “My fork went right through his flesh, hitting bone. I had never heard screams like that before, even louder than my mother’s. And fuck, I was pissed when he bled all over the best meatloaf I had ever tasted. But I still ate every crumb while everyone else was running around the kitchen in a panic.”
“Wow. Did you get into trouble even though he started it and deserved it?”
“Oh, yeah. I got thrown into juvie.”
“For how long?”
